Unfinished business

Like the latest report [pdf] from the National Alliance to End Homelessness, which looks at changes in homelessness nationwide from 2008 to 2009. The findings—for example, that homelessness rose (in 31 states and the District of Columbia) after years of declining rates and numbers of homeless people—are certainly not surprising but they confirm the harsh toll exacted by high unemployment and cuts in social services during the Second Great Depression.

And the fact that, according to University of California-Irvine biology professor Diane K. O’Dowd and research professors at Harvard University, Yale University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and elsewhere, “reward systems at universities heavily favor science, math and engineering research at the expense of teaching.” This is one of the unfortunate trends, and not just in the sciences, of the new corporate university.

Then there’s Tyler Cowen’s unfortunate initial dismissal of Michel Foucault’s work (“Most of his books have not held up very well as history, even if he succeeded in drawing people’s attention to some neglected factors. On top of that, his theoretical framework is incoherent.”), although in a subsequent post he does admit that reading Foucault “is one useful path out of extreme positions of methodological individualism.” Most economists have remained mostly ignorant of Foucault’s writings (not knowing enough to even be dismissive). But I can recommend two useful references: one general, Gary Gutting’s Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005); and one specifically for economics, Jack Amariglio’s “The Body, Economic Discourse, and Power: An Economist’s Introduction to Foucault,” History of Political Economy 20 (1988): 583-613.

And Maxine Udall’s unfortunate defense of the “science of economics,” as a critique of David Brooks’s idea of economics as art, in which she conflates economics with the concepts and mathematical models of neoclassical economics. Even on those grounds, she mistakenly assumes (in discussing the economics of health), she assumes that resources are being efficiently allocated to health care—thus putting the economy on its production possibilities frontier and creating a false tradeoff between taking “resources away from health advantaged people in order to give them to health disadvantaged people.” She should know both that are non-neoclassical theories of the economics of health and that current the health care system in the United States is far below its potential.

Finally, there’s George Demartino’s superb summary of the state of discussion within the American Economic Association about conflict of interest and disclosure.

Economists are creative people who love to solve pressing social problems. If we haven’t yet solved the problem of conflict of interest in economics, perhaps it’s not because the problem is so darn difficult. Perhaps it’s because we’ve never really tried.